Month: April 2022

Showing up in more traditional mediums as well as on platforms like Twitch and Snapchat will allow the brand to reach new audiences as well as boost brand awareness. Much of Supergoop’s advertising focus was on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and, more recently, TikTok where the “mindful millennial” spends their time, explained LeBlanc.

Many brands that previously focused their advertising on Facebook and Instagram have sought to diversify their advertising mix by adding more traditional channels in recent years. Doing so has come as a result of privacy regulations and crowded social ad channels, making diversification necessary, as previously reported by Digiday. That being said, LeBlanc pointed to the need to reach new audiences over diversification for the strategy shift.

It’s unclear how much Supergoop was spending on those channels or how the company allocates its ad budget as LeBlanc declined to share those figures or percentages. Per Kantar, Supergoop spent $329,745 on media in 2021, up from $66,191 in 2020. Those figures exclude what Supergoop spent on social media advertising as Kantar doesn’t track social spending.

While adding out-of-home and print to the mix with a full-page ad in the New York Times will reach a broad, diverse audience, adding platforms like Twitch to the mix allows Supergoop to target men in a way the brand hadn’t previously. “We know that Twitch’s audience base has a larger penetration of men than some of the other channels that we’ve been advertising in,” said LeBlanc.

It’s necessary for a brand to expand its advertising footprint beyond its main channels to reach new audiences, explained brand consultant and co-founder of Metaforce Allen Adamson. “To broaden your reach you have to broaden your media channels,” said Adamson. “If you want to build reach over frequency you have to have more channels to do that. The most effective way to build reach is to expand [your advertising channels].”

The company’s in-house marketing team is behind the advertising shift as well as its new creative campaign. With its new campaign, the company will highlight people who prioritize sunscreen as part of their daily routine to potentially inspire others to do so.

“We’re trying to offer ways for different people who might not have thought, ‘I am concerned with my overall health but I’m not necessarily wearing sunscreen every day’ to hear someone’s personal story,” said LeBlanc. “Then maybe they have that takeaway that they too could be wearing SPF every day as part of their health and wellness routine.”

Walled gardens, typically prefer their own technologies and limit third-party participation meaning publishers and independent ad tech players have their work cut out for them over the next 18-months if they are to maintain relevance for advertisers.

As a response, independent players want to authenticate the (otherwise unknown) web with their proliferation of identity solutions — The Trade Desk’s Universal ID 2.0, arguably, the most high-profile example.

In recent weeks, the demand-side platform announced a series of partnerships including a tie-up with LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution to better ensure that Universal ID 2.0 complies with EU privacy laws, as it attempts to buttress its position post-2023.

The Trade Desk also penned a partnership with Adobe to bolster the addressable base of UID 2.0 — an identifier that synchs with partners’ first-party data to improve ad targeting by synching with the email addresses that can be accessed via the software giant’s customer data platform.

A ‘complicated’ relationship

Elsewhere, The Trade Desk recently unveiled OpenPath, a supply-path optimization effort whereby the DSP offers advertisers direct access to premium ad inventory with publishers including Condé Nast, Gannett, Hearst and Reuters among those on board at launch.

Among other aspects of the SPO crackdown, the DSP will eschew Google’s Open Bidding — an aspect of Google’s ad stack that comes in for criticism in the ongoing Texas AG-led antitrust case — a move it likewise asks supply-side platforms to mirror.

In a recent public discussion, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said his company, along with the entire ad industry has a “complicated relationship” with Google with his comments indicating that, if true, the allegations made by the Texas AG signal problems ahead. “Google [allegedly] creating a partnership with Facebook,” he added, “to then guarantee it a certain amount of market share by offering them lower prices than what they would to anybody else … you could see how that can be seen as anti-competitive.”

A surprise disruption

OpenPath caused some degree of fluster with media agencies (the primary client-constituency of The Trade Desk) and supply-side platforms (a tier of the industry that is arguably most at risk of such direct integrations) taken surprise by the public announcement.

For instance, some asked questions over how The Trade Desk intends to provide assurances to both the buy- and sell-side of the market, after all, isn’t Google’s attempts to collect revenues from all tiers of the market at the core of its criticism?

Meanwhile, publishers are faced with the quandary over how best to juggle demand; is it best to maintain longstanding relationships with SSPs, or go more directly with the industry’s largest independent DSP?

Will Doherty, vp of inventory management at The Trade Desk, moved to assure such concerns adding that OpenPath poses an additional choice for both buyers and sellers alike. “The only thing we’ve done here is, with publishers that we think are strategically important and in line with our overall investment strategy, is created an additional option and remove one link from the chain,” he said.

Publisher’s dilemma?

Separate sources indicated to Digiday that direct integrations with DSPs such as The Trade Desk are a more realistic option for scaled, technically sophisticated publishers. Meanwhile, long-tail publishers, with fewer resources, are better serviced by traditional SSPs.

“We don’t bid differently into OpenPath than we would through an SSP, the real question for a publisher to have to answer is [whether] there is a benefit to receive a bid directly from The Trade Desk or through an SSP partnership,” added Doherty. “We are not in the publisher business, it’s just the ability to work more closely with publishers has been made much easier as a result of advancements of header bidding.”

OpenPath publishers will pay The Trade Desk an integration fee that will go towards infrastructure costs – a fee that is not intended to act as an additional revenue stream. Doherty detailed how this will cover services such as bidstream-management, etc. with the intricacies involved in such a set-up (for both buyer and seller alike) all made clear in its contractual terms.

Although, separate SSP sources noted that compression of the supply chain is likely to bring downward pressure on publishers’ margins. For instance, publishers and SSPs that want to facilitate Google’s Open Bidding will have to pay for separate integrations.

Sell-side sources, all of whom requested anonymity due to their reliance on The Trade Desk demand, told Digiday the DSP’s public statements were “confusing”, especially when juxtaposed to the (effective) bypassing of sell-side ad tech for select publishers.

“The Trade Desk is not concerned with maximizing yield for publishers and I think that can create some issues down the line,” added one source. “If you’re bypassing an auction, a buyer will always go for the lower price. So, it seems to me it’s going to put some downward pressure on publishers over time … rather than what an auction does which is to create what I’d call a fair price.”

In an emailed statement, sent separately to Digiday, Jeff Hirsch, chief commercial officer at PubMatic, commented that SSPs help publishers without the technical sophistication for direct integrations do the opposite; maximize yield.

“The rise of header bidding has shown that increased competition leads to higher CPMs for publishers,” read the statement. “As bid density drops, publishers should reconsider their flooring strategies to ensure they receive fair market value for their inventory.”

A case of counter-disintermediation?

A duplicative supply chain can result in a scenario whereby buy-side players are operating blind. For instance, publisher inventory represented by more than one SSP can often result in DSPs bidding twice in the same auction, thus needlessly driving up their costs. So, in theory, OpenPath benefits all buy-side players.

However, some questioned whether or not OpenPath was an effort from The Trade Desk to offset the SPO initiatives of holding companies in recent years — activities that have primarily involved them cozying up to SSPs? This is a trend that, some believe, has served to disintermediate DSPs.  

Multiple sources told Digiday that DSPs are largely irritated by agency holding groups striking partnerships with SSPs as it effectively shifts control over where advertisers’ budgets are invested from DSPs to SSPs. “It basically means that the holding group now cares about transacting through a specific SSP,” explained one source who declined to be named given their relationships with both DSPs and SSPs.

The Trade Desk’s Doherty told Digiday that OpenPath “is something that many of our buyers [primarily media agencies] have been pushing us to do for a while” given the growing complexity of the programmatic supply chain.

“For us, the reason we’re doing this is less to do with fees and everything to do with how much better and stronger our bids perform when we give it directly to the publisher,” said Doherty, adding that holding group’s SPO efforts and their own can co-exist.

Andrew Goode, evp and managing director, investment at Havas Media Group, told Digiday how the SPO-landscape is still evolving and that other DSPs are likely to be paying attention to OpenPath with a view to potentially emulating it.

“There is a potential ground-shift happening where agency and SSP relationships may somewhat disintermediate the role of the DSP for supply selection,” he wrote in an emailed statement adding that offering clients full visibility on where they invest is key.

“OpenPath providing an opportunity to bypass the SSP auction is a smart move, and will potentially place SSPs under competitive pressure if they provide a lower fee structure for publishers, and bring financial transparency to the process,” concluded Goode.  

Data protection

The key hits:

• Publishers are wary of cookie-replacing identifiers replicating the third-party cookie’s ills.
• Email-based IDs like Prebid’s Unified ID 2.0 do not provide publishers as much control over their data as they would like.
• Akamai may offer a solution that suits publishers.

When it comes to identity technology, publishers feel like they were fooled before by the third-party cookie. They are determined not to be beguiled by its replacements that depend on publishers opening up their first-party data.

“We don’t want to replace cookies with hashed IDs using email…. We should not be replicating the current system,” said one publishing executive during a closed-door session at the Digiday Publishing Summit that was held last week in Vail, Colorado. 

This executive was far from alone in their wariness of the post-cookie landscape for publishers resembling the cookie era — to the point that one publishing executive half-jokingly wondered whether the assembled publishers risked violating any laws if the conversation turned toward the group mounting a united front against ad tech intermediaries seeking publishers’ first-party data.

“Everyone feels like we already gave up the data once to everybody else. The question is, how do we control it this time around a little bit smarter, not chase the nickel and actually get the dollar?” said a second publishing executive in attendance.

The publishing executives’ concerns boil down to their recognition that their audiences are their oil and identity tech often permits outside companies to siphon that black gold. In other words, enabling ad tech companies to identify and track publishers’ audiences around the wider web — as they have done with the third-party cookie and stand to do with its replacements — risks diluting the publishers’ value in dealing with advertisers by commodifying their audiences.

“If we go down this path of publishers putting their identity into the auction and it gets shared and duplicated the same way that third-party cookies drove [demand-side platforms’] growth, you’ll never get it back and you will lose the last thing to answer the question, ‘why shouldn’t I just buy you in the open auction?’” said a third publishing executive in attendance.

A fourth publishing executive in attendance said the data management platform they use is already aggregating all of its publisher clients to put together “competing marketplace deals.” This executive’s recourse has been “doubling down on the hashed email. We can control hashed email; we can then sync with anyone and try to expose that data when we choose to,” they said.

However, that’s not entirely true. Publishers can only control how they expose their hashed email data to a certain extent. Unified ID 2.0 is among the most well-known identity tech built on hashed emails. But UID 2.0 doesn’t provide publishers with as much control over who their data is exposed to as publishers would like.

“It’s all platform-based. I can enable it for the entire Trade Desk and for [Google’s DSP] DV360. But I want to get down to enabling it by the seat level: I know I have a partnership with this particular agency or group that we have contracts with, we know what they’re doing with it. But the technology just isn’t there yet,” said a fifth publishing executive in attendance.

“Right now it’s a one-to-many [relationship when providing access] and we lose track and credibility and transparency in the current environment — I would like to not do any of that,” said another publishing executive.

So what are publishers to do? Some publishing executives in attendance struggled to see a cookieless future that does not resemble the cookie era with respect to publishers’ data becoming commodified. But others saw hope in one identity tech option that turned several publishers’ heads during a working group session on “Life After the Cookie.”

Akamai has a solution “that actually seems like a really good idea because no data is actually shared. It’s all marketer-centric; they have to come with data,” said a publishing executive during the working group. As this executive explained, Akamai would use its role as a content delivery network that serves content across the web to effectively function as its own clean room so that an advertiser would provide an audience segment of people it wants to target with ads and Akamai would handle the targeting without a publisher needing to share any email addresses.

“That is something I’m rooting for because that allows marketers to target who they want to target, we don’t have to give them data and, in theory, that just seems like the best way to do it,” said the executive.

But there’s a but. You may have noticed two words in that quote: “in theory.” Therein lies the rub, as another publishing executive in the working group identified: “We like the Akamai approach as well. But there’s no money there yet.” — Tim Peterson

What we’ve heard

“We were working with one vendor where we had to show them that they were out of compliance.”

— Publishing executive

3 questions with The New York Times’ new team working to personalize the homepage

The New York Times is testing a transition from a more manual approach to programming the homepage of its site and app to one that will incorporate algorithms to personalize the presentation of stories.

Coinciding with that transition, The New York Times announced last week the formation of the “experiments and personalization” team. Part of the Times’ “home” team, the new group will work with editorial desks and product teams to test algorithms designed to get readers to engage with more content and continue returning to the homepage, such as targeting readers based on their location or reading history.

The team is led by Derrick Ho, deputy editor for personalization. Digiday spoke to Ho and associate managing editor Karron Skog, who oversees the home team, to find out why the Times is putting more resources into experimenting with personalizing the home page for subscribers.

“We are using data to help us make decisions, in an editorially-informed way,” Skog said. — Sara Guaglione

The interview has been edited and condensed. 

What are the specific responsibilities and priorities of this new team?

Skog: We publish something like 200 URLs a day that my team is sifting through, reading, evaluating and programming onto this very finite surface of our home screen and our app. No reader can get through 200 pieces a day. We are trying to use some of this work to really put the right things in front of the right readers at the right times. The top of our home screen and our news priorities for the day are the same for everyone and will be the same for everyone. Our readers value the Times’ editorial judgment. So that’s really quite sacrosanct. I think that there are ways, though, that we can help readers find this journalism. We’ve got subscribers who come to us once a week, and we have people who are coming to us five to 10 times a day. How do we program for those two very different types of readers? The experimentation is trying to help do what we can’t really do in manual programming. We’re constantly putting things on the home screen and taking things off the home screen and moving things around. Making sure that readers see the things that we think are important on any given day, no matter when they visit us, is a big piece of this work. For me, that’s something that we wished we could do for a really long time. And the fact that we have a team now devoted to really trying to make that happen is really exciting.

Ho: We’re introducing a different mode of programming here. We are still in the very early stages, but we [have been] given the room and space to experiment and try new concepts and think about new ways we can amplify our editorial judgment and also meet reader needs. There’s also room and space for us to work with product. We’re still very much in the phase where we are trying to build the tools and refine the tools. We are researching and doing a lot of user research.

Homepages were all the rage a few years ago. Why the focus on this now?

Skog: I have been working on the home screen at The New York Times for a very long time. And we’ve gone through many phases of how we program it. Eight years ago, people came to us once a day. So we needed to leave things on the home screen for a very long time. And then a couple years later, people were coming many, many times a day, and we felt like we needed to switch out everything very, very quickly. In more recent years, our subscriber numbers have increased and it’s really led us to this point where we can’t make the experience great for everyone with our manual programming. We need to scale that. And this is one way that we can do it. We want the experience to be far superior than what [readers] can get from one of our articles found in the wild. Our team has grown so much in the past five years and has added so many different capabilities — personalization being one of them, more editors is another one. [The home screen] is our most valuable platform and the one that we really want to put the most effort into making the best. That has been a shift.

How much of this work is already taking place on the home screen?

Ho: We’ve tried a couple of geo-targeting experiments. We gave readers in California an extended package during [Gov. Gavin Newsom’s] recall election last year. We felt we could add value to one of our largest growing markets, in California. We saw really good results with that. And we wouldn’t have been able to do that with some of the traditional experimentation tools that test headlines. In this case, we are testing a full experience for a certain segment of our readers. Right now, a couple of active [tests] are the “In Case You Missed It” module, right below Opinion. There’s an algorithm that works behind it to showcase some of the breadth of work that we have, as well as amplify some of the strongest pieces. But we’re constantly checking what stories are going there. There are editors behind the pool of stories that are there.

Skog: There is likely a reader for every story we publish and we’re just trying to find those readers. If we know you’re in California, for instance, we can give you more localized content. For the California wildfires, we talked about doing emergency locations to go to that people in New York would not necessarily need to see, but people in California would appreciate. News is magnetic. What we have to work really hard to do is making sure that we surface all of the other amazing journalism that we have throughout the Times for our readers. That’s what makes us special.

Numbers to know

80: Editorial positions that LinkedIn plans to add this year.

9%: Percentage stake that Elon Musk has taken in Twitter.

45: Articles that WNYC removed from its website because they contained plagiarized content.

25%: Percentage share of BBC’s staff that will come from low socioeconomic backgrounds by 2027.

3: Number of podcasts that are departing Patreon to be distributed through Substack.

What we’ve covered

How Refinery29’s Simone Oliver is complementing content with commerce:

• Refinery29 plans to start testing live shoppable video this spring, likely on YouTube at first.
• Oliver joined the Digiday Podcast for a live recording during the Digiday Publishing Summit.

Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast here.

Why TheSkimm is extending its daily newsletter to the weekend:

• TheSkimm has started publishing a new edition of its flagship newsletter every Saturday morning.
• TheSkimm’s weekend edition is created by a team made up of three new hires, a group of writers and other staffers.

Read more about theSkimm’s weekend newsletter here.

Confessions of a former esports journalist who pivoted to marketing:

• The former journalist tired of esports teams taking issue with their reporting.
• One team threatened to sue the former journalist over their reporting.

Read more about the former journalist’s career change here.

Why The New Yorker is using more ‘voice’ in its daily newsletter:

• The newsletter had previously been primarily a collection of links and lacked original material.
• The New Yorker’s daily newsletter has nearly 2 million subscribers and averages more than 1 million daily opens.

Read more about The New Yorker’s daily newsletter here.

What we’re reading

BuzzFeed v. ex-BuzzFeed employees:
BuzzFeed wants the former employees suing the publisher over its IPO to pay half of BuzzFeed’s legal costs, according to Axios.

Spotify v. Parcast Union:
Spotify’s ongoing negotiations with its podcast union is reaching the point where the union’s employees are willing to strike if an agreement is not reached, according to Bloomberg.

Facebook v. misinformation:
Since last October, a bug with Facebook’s content ranking system led to the platform not properly suppressing but instead amplifying posts containing misinformation, according to The Verge.

BBC v. female employees of color:
More than a dozen female employees of color have quit the BBC because they say the British broadcaster continues to favor “white, middle-class and privately educated staff,” according to Variety.

In a bid to fill this knowledge gap, the Interactive Advertising Bureau held its first-ever PlayFronts event on Tuesday — a day-long conference on the subject of advertising and partnership opportunities in gaming, featuring presentations from stakeholders across the industry, including adtech providers, publishers, agencies and brands.

“There’s just been the perfect storm right now,“ said Zoë Soon, the event organizer and a vp at the IAB’s Experience Center. “We’re seeing changes in consumer habits — so declining linear TV viewership — and CTV is getting oversaturated, and video games is another form of video, and it has such a great young audience.”

The way the event played out showed just how wide this gulf in knowledge can be in the nascent industry of game advertising. For some attendees on the tech or gaming side, much of the information shared in the presentations was not particularly revelatory; conversely, many less-experienced audience members on the brand or agency side spent the entire time jotting down notes and snapping photos of the presenters’ charts and graphs.

Regardless, as the first IAB event dedicated to the role of gaming in advertising, PlayFronts was a productive affair for all involved, even those with ample knowledge of the space. (< let’s kill this sentence) In addition to being a veritable Who’s Who of game advertising industry stakeholders, the event gave vendors a much-needed opportunity to share their services with brands, agencies and publishers such as Activision Blizzard and Riot Games.

Here are some of Digiday’s key takeaways from the PlayFronts. Nearly 700 people participated in the event, with a near-equal split between virtual and in-person attendees. (It also featured the PlayFronts Cup, a lunchtime Rocket League tournament won by a team from Xaxis.)

People are getting tired of the usual statistics

In a bid to inform the less-experienced members of the audience, many of the presenters leaned on tried-and-true statistical points that might be familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a game-advertising pitch deck — specifically the fact that roughly 50 percent of gamers are women, and that gamers are no longer mostly teens in their parents’ basements. 

While these statistics are real, they elicited some eye-rolls from some of the more experienced operators in the room. The demographic expansion of the gaming audience is nothing new, and industry veterans at PlayFronts found themselves surprised by the number of attendees who appeared to be taken off-guard by this information.

“Lots of women have been in gaming for a very long time,” said Sarah Stringer, evp of U.S. media partnerships at Dentsu Media, who first explored advertising in gaming about 15 years ago. “It’s just been very interesting to see that the industry has still had this bias, thinking it’s just teenage boys.”

Demographics are king

While industry veterans may have rolled their eyes at the aforementioned statistics, brands and agencies’ enthused reactions to them showed that both game developers and their adtech partners would be wise to stress their platforms’ expanding demographic reach when pitching their services to non-endemic brands.

This enthusiasm was on full display as American Eagle vp of marketing, media, performance and engagement Ashley Schapiro caught up with Digiday following her afternoon presentation, which focused on the clothing company’s branded Roblox experience. “One thing that’s really interesting, that I didn’t get to say, is that Livetopia, which is the Roblox experience that we’re on, is 65 percent female,” Schapiro said. “So that was one of the reasons we actually chose Livetopia — because it also hit our female customer base.”

Gaming advertising is a wide-ranging and diverse industry in its own right

Though Tuesday’s event was the IAB’s first function dedicated specifically to gaming, game advertising has been a presence at past events, such as the IAB UK’s Gaming Upfronts event last year, which was part of the organization’s broader Upfronts series. (<let’s cut this graph to get to the point faster)

As the role of games in advertising continues to expand, PlayFronts could eventually merit its own sub-events catering to specific sectors of the game advertising space. There were enough in-game advertising companies in attendance to fill their own event — including six of the presenting speakers — while some presenters got more theoretical as they discussed the philosophy behind the metaverse and how it relates to gaming. Others, such as IGN, focused on the role of games media in connecting brands to gamers, while some stressed the strength of older game-advertising formats such as rewarded video and interstitial ads.

“There’s a lot of different philosophies, and there’s a lot of different ways where it’s integrated,” said Jonathan Stringfield, vp and global head of business marketing, measurement and insights at Activision Blizzard Media. “I think a few folks have done a really nice job saying (staying? this part of the quote stopped me) in-the-game, adjacent-to-the-game, outside-the-game, frameworks like that. I think it’s super helpful to think about, realistically, what makes sense for the brand, so when we’re at the onset, having more options is probably better.”

If the IAB continues to hold PlayFronts events — and Soon said she’s “pretty sure” it will — the in-game advertising space could eventually merit its own dedicated “In-Game PlayFronts” event at some point down the line.

“There’s definitely value for those different types of advertising, different formats, different studios, different platforms,” said Jonathan Troughton, CEO of in-game ad company Frameplay. “But for us, we do believe in-game’s going to be the dominant form, because that’s where you get the best experience.”

The connection between gaming and the metaverse is clear, but still speculative

Four of the event’s twelve content presentations had “metaverse” in their titles, and nearly all of them touched on the potential for the metaverse to arise out of gaming environments. The shared thesis was clear: the metaverse is a more immersive and three-dimensional successor to the modern internet, and it logically follows that gamers might be its first denizens, given their relative youth, technological aptitude and experience navigating virtual worlds.

“It was a commercial decision,” said Francesco Petruzzelli, co-founder and managing director of the in-game ad provider Bidstack, whose presentation was titled “Forging a New Path for Brands in the Metaverse.” “In my opinion, metaverse lowers the barriers to brands engaging in gaming. I know that gaming itself carries positive connotations, but I think metaverse carries even more positive connotations.”

However, not everyone at the event agreed with this analysis, with some observers cautioning companies against putting the cart before the horse in terms of the metaverse and its evolution out of the gaming space.

“Marketers are going to do what marketers do best — they want to chase the next big thing, and they’re like, ‘absolutely, the metaverse sounds super exciting,’” Activision Blizzard Media’s Stringfield said. “And I think we’re in real danger of leapfrogging all this necessary knowledge of gaming first. I think it’s super important that we nail those fundamentals on gaming, and from there, I think there’s some really exciting possibilities.”

The timing couldn’t have been better

Disagreements over the metaverse connections notwithstanding, every attendee that Digiday spoke to at IAB PlayFronts agreed that the event came at an auspicious moment.

“When we, as the committee, spoke about the timing of this event, our goal was to inspire and educate people on this opportunity,” said Frameplay chief strategy and operations officer Cary Tilds, who co-chairs the IAB’s gaming and esports committee. “We knew that we needed to have it during this time frame versus the fall. I’m really thankful to the IAB, because if we didn’t get this stage, it would almost be too late for this year,” she said, referring to many brand strategists’ year-long strategic plans. 

Though the event was well-timed, the primary motivation behind the IAB’s timing was simply the “perfect storm” that Soon mentioned, rather than a calculated media planning play. “Over the past couple of years, we’ve talked about COVID and how that’s raised interest in gaming over the last 8-10 months; we’ve talked about web3 metaverse and what have you.

You strike when the iron is hot,” said Stringfield, who sits on the board at the IAB. “As an industry, we need to be good at making clear when there’s opportunities here. When we’re top of mind for folks, when people are excited about it, let’s engage with them. So, in that respect, I think the timing is perfect.”

“The goal is to build a digitally-centric, next-gen publishing platform that’s going to last for decades to come,” Borsa said during the Digiday Publishing Summit on March 28.

Borsa highlighted the stark difference between the two media companies integrating compared to the Time Inc. merger with Meredith in 2018 before Time was ultimately sold later that year.

Unlike Meredith’s merger with Time Inc. in 2018, where the companies had to “find synergies and cost savings to drive the business forward,” the focus of the deal with Dotdash was to find the growing areas of the business and “invest further to propel it forward,” Borsa said.

There are five main areas in which Dotdash Meredith is integrating the company: its portfolio of brands, sales teams, ad tech stack, content platform and culture.

Brands

The combined Dotdash Meredith now has “more and diverse brands,” Borsa said, ranging from “legacy” brands like People and Better Homes & Gardens to “upstart” brands like Byrdie and The Spruce. 

The two companies, unlike with Time Inc., have “complementary capabilities,” such as commerce. While Meredith focuses on “news and deals,” Dotdash has built a business from its “evergreen round-ups and content,” she said.

Advertising

Because of the variety in the two companies’ brands and content, there “wasn’t a lot of overlap” in Dotdash and Meredith’s top advertisers — both in the brands and categories, according to Borsa. Dotdash Meredith is combining its ad stacks and integrating its back-end, proprietary platforms.  

However, Dotdash’s sales teams are organized around content verticals, while Meredith had a more centralized structure, Borsa said. Moving forward, Meredith will be adopting Dotdash’s organizational structure. Health and finance have been successful categories for Dotdash, versus Meredith’s relationships with retail, CPG and entertainment.

Meredith has large, multi-year, multi-million dollar partnerships with advertisers, whereas Dotdash has built relationships with “different and smaller organizations, in ways that we were not able to through our organization,” Borsa said.

Meredith had a broader suite of ad products, as well as native and sponsored capabilities. “We have a whole team of people so it was just at a different level in a different scale,” she said.

Data & engagement

Meredith has built out first-party data capabilities, while Dotdash has been focused on “highly performant contextual targeting,” according to Borsa.

Dotdash was driving organic traffic and “really making sure they’re answering consumers’ intent when they are searching for it in their moment of need” with its service-focused articles, while Meredith has a “powerful” email newsletter capability, as well as social and news content.

Culture & communication

While considered the “softer things” that tend to be “often overlooked” in a media merger, Borsa believes culture is “probably even more important than the actual integration itself.”

Dotdash is a digitally native organization that “would rather you move fast and break stuff, and ask for forgiveness later. That’s a different culture than a traditional publishing company,” Borsa said. This kind of culture can “rattle people” at an organization like Meredith. 

“You can imagine if you have a lot of people at a traditional publishing organization who have focused on the magazine business for a long time, moving into a digital-first organization? There’s going to be bumps in the road,” Borsa said.

A cross-functional team was assembled to go through the ad tech stack “line by line” to look at the “the pros and cons of both,” Borsa said. The team found “a good mixture” of different capabilities, she said. The decision-making power has often been in the hands of these sorts of teams, who then make recommendations to upper management, she said. But it also helps to have similarities between the two companies to make the transition easier. “Because we weren’t that different from an ad tech perspective, it hasn’t been that hard,” Borsa said.

As for centralizing the CMS and the companies’ content stack, it’s been a little trickier. Both Dotdash and Meredith had built proprietary platforms — but Meredith is moving onto Dotdash’s platform. “It’s more agile, more performant and also allows for more flexibility for the brand,” Borsa said.

One thing that does help the integration is that both platforms are relatively new. “We’ve had acquisitions in the past where you’re on really old tech and you’re trying to merge onto new tech. We haven’t had to do that,” she added.

General managers are responsible for each content category, who work with CROs for each of those different categories. However, flexibility is key, Borsa said, as some advertisers do not fit into one specific content category, such as retailers like Walmart, which spans across home and CPG, for example.

How is Dotdash Meredith training its teams to prepare for these changes? Although Meredith previously had a more centralized structure, employees in sales “naturally gravitated” towards certain categories and advertisers, Borsa said.

A big part of the transition will be incentivizing collaboration, which Dotdash Meredith will do by reorganizing its sales compensation structure. While the company is still “going through the details,” an important thing to consider is how to “comp someone in the midst of a transition when you may have been working on an account, now you’re transitioning — you got to make sure that you’re comping them for the work that they’ve done with their current client list, if their client list is going to change. That’s the bigger change, from a cost perspective,” Borsa said.

The key lesson from the Dotdash Meredith merger seems to be to combine two companies that already have capabilities that fit together to reduce friction or dramatic cost-cutting decisions. 

But at the end of the day, “doing an integration and building trust and relationships is super hard on Zoom,” Borsa said. Achieving a large media merger while mostly continuing to work remotely has presented “one of the biggest challenges,” Borsa said. “We’re going through these massive changes, and you still have people on Zoom.”

Borsa believes that once employees return to the office this month, it will have a “dramatic impact” on bringing the two companies and their employees together.